HISTORY TIP OF THE DAY

Allies begin bombing Dresden, February 13th, 1945

The British Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Force conducted four raids on Germany’s seventh-largest city. The attack figures in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, who was being held as a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time. The bombing has been cited by Holocaust deniers to propose a moral equivalence between the war crimes committed by the Nazi government and the killing of German civilians by Allied bombing raids.

The Dresden bombings were a catastrophic slaughter of civilians. Allied bombers dropped 3,900 tons of bombs, killing somewhere between 35,000 and 100,000 people and leveling four square miles of the city.